Agilent to Accelerate Development in Toxicology Testing with Funding from NIH Grant

The consortium has been funded to map and provide quantitative dose-response models for selected pathways of toxicity. Its goal is to establish a public data resource to share the results of new testing strategies for assessing human health risks.

The project is initially focusing on endocrine disruption pathways as a first step toward mapping the complete human toxome. This effort will, in turn, improve accuracy, while lowering costs and reducing the time needed to predict the toxicity of new compounds.

Agilent will develop and contribute to the consortium new strategies for data management as well as software for data analysis and visualization. This software will be built using Agilent's GeneSpring multi-omics analysis platform. In addition, much of the data will be collected using Agilent microarrays and mass spectrometers.

Gustavo Salem, vice president and general manager of Agilent's Biological Systems Division, said, The NIH award to the consortium underscores the importance of major stakeholders working together to create this community resource and ultimately to advance toxicity testing. Agilent is committed to this vision. Our expertise in bioinformatics software and bioanalytical platforms will provide the tools for the consortium to collect, organize, share and analyze the generated data in conjunction with established databases of biochemical and toxicological knowledge.

The consortium is led by Dr. Thomas Hartung, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing. Agilent's lead investigator is Dr. Michael Rosenberg, director bioinformatics in the company's Life Sciences Group.

The other principal investigators include:
-James Yager, professor in preventive medicine, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
-Robert Kavlock, director of the National Center for Computational Toxicology at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
-Mel Andersen, associate director of the Hamner Institute for Health Sciences.
-Kim Boekelheide, professor of medical sciences at Brown University.
-Albert J. Fornace, Jr., molecular cancer research chair at Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, Georgetown University Medical Center.

Funding for the project comes from the Common Fund's NIH Director's Transformative Research Projects Program, which is designed to support exceptionally innovative, high-risk, original and/or unconventional research that has the potential to create or overturn fundamental scientific paradigms